Mitch Kapor is working on a new program which will be an open source Personal Information Manager in the spirit of Lotus Agenda, making it simple to keep track of and share email, appointments, contacts and tasks. It is well worth watching anything Mitch Kapor puts his mind to. In addition to Agenda, he earlier created Lotus 1-2-3, and he's one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Designing organizations for flow experiences: "There is a name for the experience when people are so focused that it amounts to absolute absorption in an activity, providing a sense of discovery, a creative feeling of pushing to higher levels of performance Â— into a new reality. The experience is called... flow!"

I occasionally look in search engines for the main websites I maintain, and also for my own name. Maybe because I'm a little vain, but also to measure what effect I have on the Internet world. I'm Flemming #5 in Google. And then I run into a cute little piece like this. My French is not very good, but I think it says that the guy is happy about having met a very good friend through NCN, and then he quotes a piece I wrote about "Learning". I'm not sure where I wrote that, but, hm, it's kind of nice. It is hard to appreciate my own writing, other than when I run into it years later, or somebody else quotes it.

I once ran into a fellow who was fond of making mini-books out of short texts that he liked. Something like 2" x 1.5" and with 8-20 pages in each. Very unusual format, which he created on a normal printer, by printing many of the little pages double-sided on a regular size paper, and then cutting them out, folding them and stapling them together, like a magazine. And it was actually really nice to read a short text that way, and it was a very handy thing to give to people when you meet them. He had made a couple of my articles into those mini-books, and there too I had that experience, of being able to appreciate something I had written, because it was repackaged in a very digestible way. Now, if I could just remember his name ...

"Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine, and at last you create what you will." -- George Bernard Shaw

21 Oct 2002 @ 02:54 by jstarrs : Frunch....Hi Flemming, well, the French piece basically says that he found his true love through NCN (blush) and thanks you for the Learning piece. How does it feel to be a matchmaker, as well? ;0) Jeff

21 Oct 2002 @ 07:01 by istvan : Flow experiencesIt is interesting to see how the mind of modern man almost struggles to rediscover the the natural workings of nature -flow-.
In modern life of societies this natural flow have been interrupted and prevented from occuring by the by the also natural(all that appears in nature is natural),sidekick of the mind the EGO.The ego and its activity, competitiveness are like dams in the FLOW and intellectual discussions about the lack of water below the dam is well worth considering for it may eventually lead to a conclusion that dams prevent flow.
Now if i could only get these honorable genleman to meditate.